I think Caplan gets many things right—even unpopular things that are difficult for academics to admit. It’s true that a large fraction of what passes for education doesn’t deserve the name—even if, as a practical matter, it’s far from obvious how to cut that fraction without also destroying what’s precious and irreplaceable. He’s right that there’s no sense in badgering weak students to go to college if those students are just going to struggle and drop out and then be saddled with debt. He’s right that we should support vocational education and other non-traditional options to serve the needs of all students. Nor am I scandalized by the thought of teenagers apprenticing themselves to craftspeople, learning skills that they’ll actually value while gaining independence and starting to contribute to society. This, it seems to me, is a system that worked for most of human history, and it would have to fail pretty badly in order to do worse than, let’s say, the average American high school. And in the wake of the disastrous political upheavals of the last few years, I guess the entire world now knows that, when people complain that the economy isn’t working well enough for non-college-graduates, we “technocratic elites” had better have a better answer ready than “well then go to college, like we did.”

But in any future I can plausibly imagine where the government actually axes education, the savings go to things like enriching the leaders’ cronies and launching vanity wars.

and that's pretty narrow-minded, although of course he's just riffing. aaronson's politics tend to get in the way an awful lot, considering it's a physics blog mostly for physics. the adage about sticking to what you're good at comes to mind.

anyway, his objections mostly miss the point. mentions anti-research, doesn't mention the reproducibility crisis; claims that the system built for smart people is good at producing more smart people despite the obvious possibility that he's reasoning backwards, etc.

Lately I've learned to feel less bad about not reading these "policy" books. Sure, it's arguably better to read every chapter of Capital in the Twenty-First Century than look at animated gifs, but by consuming a variety of reviews, blog arguments, and interviews I can get a pretty good idea of the contents (as well as I would remember some time after reading, anyway) and also a rounded view of how the arguments were received and criticized. Mainly, I can enjoy exposure to a lot more books, and when the content-to-length ratio seems high enough I'll read it anyway.

Caplan got a lot of traction in the circles I follow, and some from a wider audience; he wished for more in Leftist Lessons of The Case Against Education. I picked this review because it gave the most complete synopsis of the book that I have seen, and was also remarkable for the way the book anticipated the objections in the review.

The wishful thinking about where Ed dollars could be better spent seems like a weak point on both sides.